UK government injects £1.6m to finance HyperCat IoT standard

Adds to the existing £6.4m funding

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An extra £1.6m (about $2.7 million, AU$ 3 million) has been awarded by the UK government to the HyperCat consortium to continue work on a standard specification for the internet of things (IoT).

The consortium has already received £6.4 million (about $ 11 million, AU$ 12 million) funding from the TSB (Technology Strategy Board), the government's innovation agency which initially backed it when it launched two months ago.

The consortium is made up of 40 technology and communications companies based mostly in the UK, ARM and BT being the two better known.

All about IoT supremacy?

Further down the line, the BSI (British Standards Institution) will publish a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) using the consortium's research as foundation.

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a unique opportunity for the British technology industry to recapture regain its early 1980's clout when UK-based companies such as Amstrad, Acorn, BBC Micro, the Sinclair ZX80 pioneered home computing before it all went wrong.

The advent of the Raspberry Pi and the resurgence of ARM and Imagination Technologies, all important players in the IoT field, coincide with the emergence of the HyperCat project.